Phantoms

1 hr. 43 min.

Classics

Language Russian

Author Ivan Turgenev

Narrator Igor Milovanov

Description

In the mystical novella “Ghosts” (1864), Ivan Turgenev departs from his usual realism and creates a shifting phantasmagoria on the border between sleep and reality. An unnamed narrator, worn out by sleepless nights, under moonlight encounters a half-transparent female ghost named Ellis. She leads him into strange night flights: together they rise above the earth, finding themselves in different places in Europe, or as if falling through time. Before their eyes appear hazy visions of bygone centuries—sad, fading, filled with the feeling of withering.

The novella is permeated with hypnotic tension and a тревожная poetry of images. The night landscape, the cold light of the moon, and an acute sense of fleetingness turn “Ghosts” into a fantasy about the fear of disappearing and the futility of attempts to find meaning. Who was Ellis—“a phantom, a wandering soul, an evil spirit, a sylph, a vampire, finally”? The answer is never given, and this riddle long continues to hold the reader in its grip.

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